from the a-few-thousand-dollars-per-grope dept

It's been barely a month since news came to us of the Worth County (GA) Sheriff's Department's search of an entire school's worth of high school students. Over 800 students were searched without a warrant, subjected to invasive pat downs that included breasts and genitals by Sheriff Jeff Hobby and his deputies.

Sheriff Hobby thought there might be drugs in the school, but despite the search of hundreds of students and the use of drug dogs, no drugs were found. A class action lawsuit [PDF] alleging multiple rights violations brought by some of the students was filed in June. In October, Sheriff Hobby and two of his deputies were indicted for sexual battery and false imprisonment.

Each class member will receive a monetary award of between $1,000 and $6,000, with those students subjected to more invasive searches receiving higher amounts. Once any outstanding claims are resolved and attorney fees of 15% of the fund are paid, half of any remaining funds will be paid into a fund for the benefit of Worth County High School students.

This quick settlement can likely be chalked up to a handful of variables. One, Hobby and his deputies have been indicted, which gives more credence to the students' claims their rights were violated. Two, the entire 4-hour lockdown was captured on the school's surveillance cameras, all but eliminating narrative options for the law enforcement defendants. Three, Sheriff Hobby's own statements in defense of his and his deputies' actions make it very clear the sheriff supports the mass violation of rights through policies and actions.

The only reason Hobby didn't pursue another warrantless search of the entire school's student body wasn't because of concerns about students and their rights, but because people were angry.

When asked about that previous search that came up dry, Hobby said he didn't think that search was thorough, so he decided to do his own.

He said he believes there are drugs at the high school and the middle school, but also said that he will not do another search, due to response from community.

So, straight up, the sheriff believes he did nothing wrong. His deputies did nothing wrong. If anything's wrong here, it's the response from the community -- people who apparently don't understand civil rights are nothing more than obstacles that must be skirted or surmounted if we're ever going to win this war on drugs.

from the bulk-violations dept

Earlier this year, the Worth County (GA) Sheriff's Department enraged an entire nation by subjecting the entire student body of a local high school to invasive pat downs. The reason for these searches? Sheriff Jeff Hobby believed drugs would be found on campus.

Invasive searches of students at Worth County High School in Sylvester are being investigated by the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights.

The Southern Center said Tuesday that hundreds of students at the South Georgia high school were subjected to a search conducted without a warrant. Some of the searches were “highly intrusive” and involved officers touching students’ genitals and breasts.

The Southern Center is raising questions about the legality of the search.

“The Sheriff’s search of Worth County High School students went far beyond what the law permits,” said SCHR attorney Crystal Redd. “The Sheriff had no authority to subject the entire student population to physical searches of their persons, and certainly none to search students in such an aggressive and inappropriate manner.”

The sheriff brought in drug-sniffing dogs and had his deputies frisk every single attending student. The sheriff claimed the searches were legal. And not just legal, but "necessary." The end result of the multiple invasions of personal privacy? Zero drugs, zero arrests.

No drugs were found in a search of Worth County High School Friday.

Perhaps Sheriff Hobby should have taken the results of a search performed a month earlier as indicative of future results.

The Sylvester Police Department did a search on March 17, and found no drugs.

Despite two negative search results, Sheriff Hobby still expressed a desire to search the school again.

When asked about that previous search that came up dry, Hobby said he didn't think that search was thorough, so he decided to do his own.

He said he believes there are drugs at the high school and the middle school, but also said that he will not do another search, due to response from community.

According to school policies, students may be searched if there's reasonable suspicion the student is in possession of an illegal item. The same rules apply to law enforcement, but they were ignored here. Sheriff Hobby claimed he could search any student he wanted to (in this case, all of them) simply because he was accompanied by a school administrator.

One of the nine Worth County High School students who filed the lawsuit, identified as K.P., told the AJC that the April 14 search was “very, very scary.” She said the incident was stuck in her memory and it colored the rest of her senior year.

The lawsuit also details how much time the Sheriff's Department wasted violating rights and failing to discover contraband.

[T]he sheriff and his deputies locked the high school down for more than four hours and conducted body searches of close to 800 students present in school that day...

A south Georgia grand jury indicted Worth County Sheriff Jeff Hobby on Tuesday for sexual battery, false imprisonment and violation of oath of office after he ordered a school-wide search of hundreds of high school students. Deputies allegedly touched girls vaginas and breasts and groped boys in their groin area during the search at the Worth County High School April 14.

Two of Hobby’s deputies were also indicted Tuesday in connection with the case.

Under Georgia law, a police officer or sheriff accused of a crime related to their official duties can appear before a grand jury to give a statement. Private citizens facing criminal charges do not get this privilege. But the sheriff and his deputies chose not to invoke that privilege. All stayed out of the grand jury room. That’s at least in part due to a new law that curbed some of the unique privileges officers previously had to sway grand jurors.

Under a new law that took effect last year, officers would have been subject to cross examination and wouldn’t have been able to rebut statements made by prosecutors during that cross-examination.

“It’s not a balanced proceeding,” said Norman Crowe Jr., the sheriff’s attorney.

Well, of course it isn't. That's been obvious for years. But no one on the prosecutorial side has anything bad to say about it until they end up as grist for the grand jury mill.

Apparently, Sheriff Hobby is going to claim he's innocent because he didn't personally pat down any of the students. That may save him from the sexual battery charge, but it's not going to help him much with the other two: violation of oath of office and false imprisonment. Without the sheriff giving the orders, it's unlikely his deputies would have locked down a school and patted down 800 students.

Hobby's statements made in defense of the search -- all made pre-lawsuit and pre-indictment -- aren't going to help much either. He feels he's completely justified in performing en masse suspicionless searches of US citizens. They may have limited rights as minors and school attendees, but their rights do not vanish entirely once they walk on campus.

The whole debacle was an ugly abuse of Hobby's power. Preventing future abuses depends greatly on the judicial system's ability to hold the sheriff accountable for his actions. With Hobby in charge, the Worth County Sheriff's Department is unqualified to police itself. Whether or not he's convicted, he should be removed from office. His post-search comments show he's willing to violate rights of hundreds of people simultaneously to find contraband he swears exists, but has yet to actually discover.

from the another-school-outsources-its-disciplinary-processes dept

When will schools tire of involving law enforcement in routine disciplinary matters? Not soon enough, apparently.

Hunter Osborn, a senior at Red Mountain High School in Mesa, AZ, did a "teen" thing. Prompted by other teens who enjoy a good bit of teen lowbrow comedy, Osborn slipped the tip of his penis over his waistband during the football team's photo shoot. Osborn and his crotch-level co-star went unnoticed as yearbooks and game programs containing his exposed penis were published and handed out.

The school, of course, was furious. Instead of handling its own problems, it decided to turn it over to law enforcement -- for reasons only completely understood by school administrators who believe "school discipline" is pronounced "police matter." Perhaps this overreaction was fueled by the school's own editorial lapse, as it only noticed the exposed penis in the photograph after Osborn bragged about it on "social media."

Insanity ensued.

[Osborn] faces 69 counts of indecent exposure, based on the students and staff who were present when the photograph was taken, and one count of furnishing harmful items to minors, according to Mesa Police Department spokesman Steve Berry. He said the investigation is ongoing.

One penis. (And not even a whole one.) 70 criminal charges. And that includes a felony that rubs elbows with producing and distributing child pornography. Never mind the fact that his "victims" (the 69 misdemeanor counts cover the teammates and staff involved in the photo shoot) included the same teammates who dared him to expose himself. And who also "exposed" themselves to him on repeated occasions with no complaints, as one particularly astute AZ Central reader pointed out.

As reader Jim McManus wrote, “This young man is being charged for exposing himself to his teammates during the picture taking, which no one noticed at the time. Approximately 15 minutes later he and all the people he ‘abused’ went back to the locker room and all took off their (clothes) exposing themselves to each other.”

Yes, there's a difference between expected penis exposure and surprise penis exposure, but the bottom line here is that many of Osborn's "victims" had seen his penis repeatedly. No one expects a penis in a group photo, but hey, peer pressure and stupidity can all be found in large quantities on the average high school campus. That the photo was published unaltered is unfortunate, but there's absolutely no reason law enforcement should have been brought in. And if law enforcement was summoned, officers should have told administrators to handle their own problems, rather than amuse themselves by tallying up 69 + 1 criminal charges.

In announcing that his office would not prosecute the felony charge against Hunter Osborn, Montgomery issued a statement reading: “An assessment of the available evidence for the felony charge of Furnishing Harmful Items to Minors, ARS 13-3506.A., leads us to conclude that the evidence does not establish a violation of the statute. MCAO has furthered review of remaining misdemeanor charges submitted by the Mesa Police Department for possible submittal to the Mesa City Prosecutor's Office.”

A Mesa police spokesman said Wednesday that the case against Hunter Osborn, 19, was returned to police for further investigation but that the case would be closed.

A good thing, too. A strict reading of the state's statute behind the single felony charge suggests Osborn could not have possibly violated it. Indecent exposure, maybe. But not furnishing harmful material to minors.

It is unlawful for any person, with knowledge of the character of the item involved, to recklessly furnish, present, provide, make available, give, lend, show, advertise or distribute to minors any item that is harmful to minors.

The only entities who performed any of the actions were the school and its photographer -- and neither of those did so knowingly.

Even though this ended relatively well, the sad fact is that if it had been handled with any sort of common sense, we never would have heard about it at all.

Superintendent of Canon City High School, George Welsh estimates that half the school is involved. That's about 500 students based on the initial stages of the investigation. Some eighth graders may also be involved.

That estimate given by Welsh has since been revised down to "certainly over 100 different kids," which is still a rather large number of students to suspend and (possibly) bring criminal charges against. Yet that's what Welsh feels should happen.

Right now their punishments are undecided but Welsh said they will likely be suspended and face criminal charges. Because posting nude photos is a class three felony, the students involved could be placed on the sex offender registry.

“Consenting adults can do this to their hearts’ content,” said Thom LeDoux, the district attorney, but “if the subject is under the age of 18, that’s a problem.”

He added that he was not interested in arresting hundreds of children and would “use discretion” if he decided to file charges.

This is a far more rational response than we're used to, although LeDoux reserving the right to "use discretion" suggests at least a few of these hundreds of students may end up on the sex offender registry. Especially with this added remark.

Mr. LeDoux, the district attorney, said the investigation would look into whether any adults were involved, whether children were bullied into participating, and whether any illegal sexual contact occurred.

As LeDoux pointed out, if everyone was over 18, all of this would be legal. But the ages of those involved invokes statutes ill-equipped to handle this sort of sexual activity by minors. Under Colorado law, any person under the age of 18 is considered a "child" for the sake of child pornography prosecutions. This means the only thing LeDoux has to do is find a few "adults" within the student body.

The general assembly hereby finds and declares: That the sexual exploitation of children constitutes a wrongful invasion of the child's right of privacy and results in social, developmental, and emotional injury to the child; that a child below the age of eighteen years is incapable of giving informed consent to the use of his or her body for a sexual purpose; and that to protect children from sexual exploitation it is necessary to prohibit the production of material which involves or is derived from such exploitation and to exclude all such material from the channels of trade and commerce.

The relevant portions of the statute would treat sexting as the production and distribution of child pornograpy. If it will be used to charge teens with sexually exploiting themselves (because they cannot give informed consent, even when photographing themselves) remains to be seen. The law, like those in other states, offers no guidance on how to proceed if the creators and recipients of the images are under the age of 18. This is where the prosecutorial discretion comes into play. A few convenient 18-year-olds would make for useful scapegoats should the community unite behind the move to prosecute its way out of this "embarassment."

Evidence that a person has knowingly received prohibited material in an e-mail could be accepted as proof that the person knowingly possessed the material, because a person who knowingly receives an e-mail is aware of the nature of its content and has immediate and knowing dominion or control over it. Fabiano v. Armstrong, 141 P.3d 907 (Colo. App. 2006).

If read directly, this means students who received unsolicited photos from other students could be found guilty of possession. Even deleting the unwanted photos is of limited defensive use.

The presence of digital images in an internet cache can constitute evidence of a prior act of possession. There was enough evidence that the jury could infer that the defendant knowingly viewed the images in the internet cache. People v. Marsh, -- P.3d -- (Colo. App. 2011).

If the DA decides some charges are warranted, these will be the laws used and they cannot be adapted to fit this situation without a significant amount of imagination and collateral damage.

For now, though, there's been far more restraint exercised than has been exhibited by others in the same situation. Unfortunately, I get the feeling this restraint is more prompted by the sheer scale of the situation, rather than a realization that child porn/sexual assault laws were never written to address this sort of thing. In cases where the sexting has only involved a handful of individuals, school administration and law enforcement have moved far more swiftly and reacted more harshly.

from the subtlety-needed dept

Even as we recently discussed yet another case of law enforcement getting involved in cases of teens sexting, a behavior that is likely more common than we prudish adults can even fathom, it seems that a group of teens in the Chicago suburbs just weren't getting the message. This isn't to say, of course, that sexting is a recommended behavior. Still, it's common enough that the existing laws and punishments in place are often more harmful than the behavior they're trying to curtail.

In this recent case, teens in a Gurnee, Illiniois highschool were passing around suggestive photos of a freshman girl. None of the accounts I've read to date have even hinted that this photo was not taken by the freshman girl herself. I say this not to demonize her behavior in any way, nor to recommend it, but only to set the facts up for when we discuss the potential punishments involved. The photo apparently spread as a result of three freshman boys passing it around. This was likely quite traumatizing for the young lady in question. She was likely mocked and/or bullied due to the photo. Those actions warrant severe action by the school and the parents of the children involved. The situation might even serve as an opportunity for the community to learn what might happen should a young person allow these photos to spread.

Instead, Johnny Law came in to clean up the O.K. Corral.

The Gurnee Police Department said three freshman boys at Warren Township High School were arrested and may face charges of distributing child pornography after they allegedly texted an explicit photo of a freshman girl, which ultimately spread throughout the school's O’Plaine campus. School officials said the investigation was handled exclusively by Gurnee Police and could not offer any information on the case because it is “an active investigation involving juveniles.”

So, what might have once been a family and school matter has transformed into a police situation. Three arrests, so far, have been made. The talk is of child pornography charges. Why is this such a big deal?

If the boys are charged and convicted in the incident, authorities say they may need to register as sex offenders. “It can affect you lifelong, it’ll follow you around,” [Cmdr. William] Meyer said.

Here's where we all have to take a big, deep breath and figure out if we're really going to allow our compassion for the young lady in this story cause us to permanently brand 3 young boys for life with the stigma of a sex offender's mark. Don't get me wrong, there can be punishment here. I have no problem with that. But we're way too intelligent a nation to simply throw up our hands and say, "The law's the law," without making even a minor effort to create some kind of subtlety where lessons can be learned without the torching of entire futures. Come on, 'Merica. You can do it.

To be sure, the prank is ill-mannered, tasteless, offensive and sexist -- something that will only narrow down the list of suspects to male high school students. (I've buried the photo of the prank letter below the fold -- sort of NSFWish.)

Some student or students mocked up an official looking letter (using the school district's logo no less) informing female students (and their parents) that a "mandatory vagina inspection" would need to be completed in order to be eligible to graduate. The letter cites "Minnesota Health Code 69" as the impetus for the impromptu inspection, and requests the removal of any piercings.

It goes on from there, using the same sort of stilted language deployed by many official school announcements, only with many more appearances by the word "vagina." The whole thing is crass on every level, and there's no way anyone would believe it originated from a school official.

Despite the fact the school can't find any evidence it was created on campus, it has still decided to move forward with an investigation.

After the school’s police liaison officer saw a tweet about it on Tuesday, Principal Dave Lund sent out an e-mail to parents explaining that administrators “are aware of this letter, and we are addressing the issue internally.”

[Kristi] Mussman [school district spokeswoman] said the prank was “done in extremely poor taste” and administrators were “disappointed.”

Determining who wrote the letter is a police matter. The liaison officer has “some strong leads,” she said.

All well and good, if you're the sort of person who believes that no bad joke should go unpunished. Obviously, the lack of on-campus misbehavior ties the district's hands. This explains its decision to hand it to the liaison officer, who can move freely between these two worlds and use the combined force of school policy and criminal statutes to nail the dastardly perpetrators who amused mostly themselves with this effort.

I'm sure the situation was slightly embarrassing for the school, but it had to be at least as embarrassing for any parent who got their huff on and rang the school, demanding to speak to "Barry McCockiner," the "director of vaginal corrections."

If anything, the prank runs afoul of federal law, which states that you're only allowed to cram unwelcome letters into mailboxes if you've paid the proper postage… and allow a uniformed postal employee to do the actual cramming. As horrifying as the phrase "violated federal law" sounds, the most likely outcome would be a small fine on par with paying the postage for the number of letters hand-delivered by the letter's author(s).

What may be worse is the imaginative reading of other, non-applicable laws performed by the liaison officer, who may be encouraged to make an example of high school boys acting exactly like high school boys. As this investigation continues, the school is attempting to finish the year out on a positive note.

Lund said that with only weeks of school left, staff members and students are trying not to dwell on the prank. “We are moving forward to finish our year strong,” he said. “We have a very good student body … and we are not going to let this prank diminish the positive performance of our students.”

Well, "not dwelling" on the prank would be a whole lot easier if you'd rein in the officer. The last thing you want as summer approaches is a bunch of negative press should this prank result in arrests, prosecution, or even in the best case scenario, the declaration that it violated school policy despite occurring completely off-campus. Your student body will move on more quickly if you actually just let it go. You can't harm the positive performance of your students, but you still have the power to deliver a ton of self-inflicted wounds.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The field of education seems ripe for disruption -- with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other forms of online classes. However, it's difficult to judge the quality of these online programs and compare them to the traditional classroom experience. The conventional wisdom has ranked prestigious universities in roughly the same order for decades, so it'll be interesting to see how online courses and degrees might factor into these lists. Here are just a few interesting links on the quality of higher education.

from the bullying-gone-legal dept

Let's start this off with the obvious: bullying sucks. In particular, when the bullies and the bullied are students, it sucks extra hard. That said, we've talked before about how overreacting to bullying situations ends up with everyone looking silly. And when the prosecutors and lawyers decide to get involved, all the more so.

A Columbia high school student faces a possible felony charge after her arrest for changing a classmate's name in the school yearbook to a sexually suggestive term. The 17-year-old Hickman High School junior was arrested May 14 after she allegedly changed a student's last name from Mastain to "masturbate" in the 100th edition of the Hickman Cresset yearbook. She could be charged with first-degree property damage, a felony, and harassment.

My first reaction to this was to be thankful that I didn't have any access to my high school's year book files. If I had, the overwhelming likelihood is that I'd still be serving time in a federal pen, with a teardrop tattoo or two on my face and a strong fear of showers. My second thought was, roughly: what the hell? Felony charges? I get that the school is probably annoyed, but this just screams of an over-reaction to suspected bullying. Hell, the victim of the prank doesn't even seem to think it's a big deal.

Raigan Mastain said although she wasn't happy about what happened, she also "wasn't devastated."

"I was kind of annoyed. It was stupid, but I wasn't that upset," she said.

Elsewhere, she pointed out that she didn't even know the girl that well, so the whole thing was strange to her.

Both Acopolis and the girl whose name was changed, Raigan Mastain, an aspiring graphic designer, called the last-minute change by another yearbook staff member as an act of immaturity, not malice. "I hardly knew her at all," said Mastain, who graduated from Hickman last week. "I barely worked with her. We weren't friends. But I didn't think I had any problems with her."

Still, given all that, Mastain went on to suggest that the charges would be warranted because "it's bullying" and "there needs to be consequences" while also noting that the damage to school property was immense. However, considering she's already graduated and didn't even know any of this had happened until a friend discovered the prank and sent her a text message, how much personal harm was actually done? And for all the talk about property damage, the school decided not to even reprint the year books, instead covering up the naughty word with a sticker. What does a sticker cost? $1? $700 worth of cost, plus a mildly annoyed fellow student, equates to felony charges?

As with so many of these stories, it's likely that emotions ran high and the school and community thought they needed to be seen doing something about so-called bullying. The end result, however, will be a young woman living the rest of her life with a felony on her record for what was a silly and stupid high school prank. That seems entirely unreasonable.

from the what-are-we-teaching-students dept

We just recently talked about the famous Tinker v. Des Moines Supreme Court ruling that establishes that students have First Amendment rights. Apparently some schools still don't realize this. Thankfully, there are some organizations willing to step in and remind them when they get confused. The ACLU of Northern California and the Asian Law Caucus were apparently able to successfully convince a San Francisco high school to reverse a previous ruling in which three students were suspended for posting some parody/joking blogs about some teachers:

In March, after students at a San Francisco high school posted parodies and irreverent memes from their home computers about teachers and school administrators on a Tumblr blog (“Teaches Pink Floyd for 3 Weeks; Makes Final Project Due In 3 Days”; “Nags Student Govt About Being On Task; Lags On Everything”), the principal dragged three students she suspected of creating the blog posts into her office and interrogated them at length. (The blog has since been taken down.) The principal then immediately suspended the students for three days, accusing them of bullying and disrupting school activities. The students were also barred from attending a school dance and prom, and even from walking with their classmates at graduation. In addition, the principal did not provide the students with an opportunity to resolve the concerns through a restorative justice approach prior to imposing the punishments, which disregards the School District’s prioritization of restorative justice as an alternative, when possible, to suspension and expulsion.

That seems like a pretty extreme reaction. When I was in high school, I actually remember doing something similar -- parodying the teacher -- in a paper for that teacher. Thankfully, he had a sense of humor. But either way, this is something that tons of high school kids do all the time. And it's clearly protected speech. Once these groups contacted the school and explained the law, the school backed down:

After we contacted the San Francisco Unified School District, they took prompt action to investigate the matter and reverse the discipline. Although the students already missed three days of school, the suspensions have been removed from their records, and they’ll be dancing at prom, and walking with their classmates at graduation.

It's too bad it even needed to go that far. What's really disturbing in all of this is what the school officials are teaching kids. Joking and parody are key forms of education and creativity. It's too bad some schools still don't recognize that (or what the law actually says).

from the criminal-intent dept

There have been a couple of new developments in the saga of the suburban Philadelphia school district, the Lower Merion School District, that was sued by a student, after that student was disciplined (supposedly for eating candy) using photos taken by secretly installed and used webcam spying software. The school initially claimed that it only used the software 42 times, but an investigation founded 58,000 photos were taken -- including hundreds of another student, who has now also sued.

At the same time, Julian Sanchez points us to the news that after all of this, the school district has finally put in place new policies designed "to govern the use and tracking of student laptops and other technology." Seems like, perhaps, that should have been in place a wee bit earlier.